Actually that is the previous enlightenment to the best of my knowledge , the screenshots that is of dr16. dr17 is the new Enlightenment , with that gold theme you mention, but it can be changed. http://www.get-e.org/Themes/E17/index.html

Have you ever actually used enlightenment 0.17? Aside from this nice features like transparency and shadows, it's BLINDINGLY FAST. The animations are still live and beautiful even with a compilation, F@H, and an OpenGL game using 100% CPU. It's at least as responsive as fluxbox, but nicer looking. There's a lot more to it than "OS X with transparency"...

I find it funny that you say that. I've always ended up leaving fluxbox because I found it incredibly efficient but unresponsive. It was like when you uniconify a window it did the draw then showed it, as opposed to showing what it's got then filling it in. This gives a nice look I'm sure, and probably a net speedup on old hardware; but I always found it strangely annoying.
Not a real criticism, I'd just never describe flux as responsive.

I tried e17 like 6 months ago, and at the time the packages I used were a bit old; but it seemed to lack any way of configuring it (aside from hand editing a big file that wasn't obvious to find). It was cool though, and pretty fast then. But after the initial reaction wore off I thought: Some of these animations are useful, telling me that my mouse is over the window, showing blatantly where it is on engage, etc; but some would just get annoying.
But hey, I get light-headed if I change themes too many times in a day.

Yeah, there was benchmarks in a story on this site not long back, showing E17 was very respectable in terms of the speed of certain window operations. Poor old Fluxbox was a dog in comparison, or at least the version he was using was.

> Seriously, E had some innovations in the beginning. Now they have OS X with transparency. Who cares.

But maybe, just maybe one day, you and most zealots will understand that not everyone wants to buy a mac (or has the money to) just to use mac os X. And you will understand that we want some things LIKE mac os x, but others are just fine as they are. And that we don't want to throw away our current computers, they work just fine thank you, and that judging by the state of things, it will be you who will be throwing mac's away by next year or two.

I always wanted to give E17 a try, but was always too lazy to install it. The cd worked great, but the E17 it had on it was disappointingly sparse. In anycase, its about time someone started a liveCD that was devoted to eyecandy, and this is a good start.

why do you still have to build evidence from source? why is it using Rox as the file manager? I use it on my suse box with the e packages from apt and it works pretty well. Can I ask to many questions?

It looks nice and I would like to try it, but the bottom toolbar is definitely a rip-off of Mac OS X. The first thing I did after installing Mac OS 10.0 years ago was disable that annoying animation effect where the icons grow huge when your mouse hovers over them, and here it is again in Linux. Hope there's no brushed metal interfaces, too.

Default e17 doesn't do the panoramic, or it didn't 6 months ago. It did this cool thing where like side bars would highlight it (it looked cool, but my memory isn't the best for visual things).
Lots of things have tried to copy the OS X Dock:
kxdocker
ksmoothdock
engage #that enlightenment one you saw
superkaramba widgets
gdesklets widgets to a lesser extent
Dockbar (windows)

Anyway, some things just make sense to copy cause they make sense. I believe Mac gets its applications aren't bound to windows from Next doesn't it?
The more important question is have they improved on it!

As much as lots of you want to give Apple credit for the E look it is undeserved. That look developed out of something Amigaish and consistent with what older E users will be used to.

You canít say that the loss of the bar at the top of the screen and the dark themes constitutes an imitation of MacOSX if the rest of the look has been consistent with what was E long before the first OSX betas?

I installed E17 for FC4 from rpm. I didn't beleive my eyes: it's really both blazing fast and eye candy at the same time. It'sa pleasure to use, though featurewise it's not complete. It even loads gnome settings daemon automatically for me. After a day of using E17 I see not many reasons to go back to GNOME 2.10 (HAL and automounting usb storage devices only).

E17 has some amazing eyecandy, but it's basically only a windowmanger with some extra tools. Like pager and launchdock. It's true it has some nice libs, but they are not used for anything except the E tools and it's unlikely they will see any wider adoption. Fact is, the windowmanager are a rather uninteresting piece of the desktop. The constant harping on about how "amazingly" fast the alternative windowmangers are, are just plain nonsens as you still have to use real applications to do anything. And that's the same applications you use without the "amazing" windowmanager. So the only thing you get expect the eyecandy are another set of libries loaded in memory, to what gain exactly. What do you speed demons do with that 1/2-1% of processor power you perhaps get extra each time you move or open a window anyways?

Aaagh! Go back to Canada gay Mac users and shut the hell up! We don't *want* mac. We *don't* like mac. Mac is gay or for pain in the ass women.

We don't use linux because we have to, we use it because we *like* it. Understand?

Now please stop assuming we all agree that mac is the greatest thing ever. We *don't like mac*! Aagh! Mac users are the most annoying ignorant arrogant penis heads! God? Please strike them down and I will never download another mp3. I swear!

E17 is very slick, very fast, very cool-looking. For me, it has the right combination of speed and looks.

In its present state (from CVS), it takes some time to get into. But once you've learned a couple of basic things, which are reasonably well documented, you can easily have a stunning -- and stunningly responsive -- setup.

I used to be the biggest fan of Enlightenment but I have since switched to the Mac. Anyway, I tried the Elive cd today on my old PC and it simply didn't boot properly unless I had it load the newer kernel. The other problem I had is that I don't have a good keyboard that works with Elive. My old keyboards are hardly working and it won't accept a USB keyboard. So I wasn't able to get it to load E17.

I did muck around a bit in E16 and I find that it doesn't feel as solid as my OS X 10.4.2 desktop. The dock doesn't have anywhere near as many features as the OS X dock either.

Anyway I'm hoping the next version of Elive will support USB Keyboards.

Iím not using it and I probably wonít. Not because itís no good, from all Iíve heard itís rather nice. Somebody is working on Ruby bindings (to implement a XMMS2 frontend in) there is work on a C++ bindings and C# (thatís supposed to bee compatible with GTK#) and other bindings are popping up. If you go to the enlightenment webpage and rasermans homepage you can find some example source code to find out if it is for you.

For the same reasons movie studios release trailers and teasers before the movie hits the cinema. To make people aware of this really cool thing that will be coming soon. To get people talking and interested. So that when it is ready a lot more people will know exactly what it is and be ready and waiting to use it.

Also this being an open source project the more people that get to play with this the greater chance they have of getting developers, testers, comments and bug reports which will speed up and improve development.

I've tried e17 a few times in its development. The animated desktop background was cool for a few minutes and the drop shadows were neat (until I realized they're "fake" and always drawn on the desktop layer instead of on whatever is under the window, like another window). However, I couldn't find any reason to use e17. After being a mac user for over 17 years, the eye-candy thing is a bit tired. I'm much more interested in window managers like ion, which actually innovates in a way that makes a computer more efficient and easy to use by truely managing windows instead of just throwing them on the screen for me to drag around and resize endlessly.

The Gnome menues was improved alot when they renamed all cryptic menu entris (like gedit) to something meaningfull (like Text Editor). I think the people E needs to do the same. Just check out this screenshot:

1- Evidence, and a lot of efl appz are already packed !!!
2- In Elive 0.1 E17 doesn't work fine, but in Elive 0.2 that's different
3- Join #elive at freenode for more info
4- There is a Elive 0.2-dev downloadable, it's a dev version ( for build drivers, ... ) not good for final user, but beatiful !
5 -Elive 0.2 will be better, more powerful !!

For that one person complaining about E copying OSX, Enlightenment was leading the way of eyecandy and WM features long before Apple started the Aqua/Cocoa thing.

I'm using E17 for my main WM and it's amazing. Right amount of subtle eyecandy and very fast. I'm in the process of switching from fluxbox to E mainly because fluxbox lacks the community and momentum that Enlightenment has.

Forinstance, fluxbox lacks a working pager (fbpager loses windows all the time) and it seems there's not much creativity or drive left in their development team (as compared to back in 2000-2001 when Fluxbox picked up steam). Enlightenment has a working pager, nice iconbar, some-what stable FM (I maybe a console man, but sometimes I like a FM), image viewer, background chooser, menu editor, amazing set of libraries and a great community of users/developers/themers.

Those are just my points on Enlightenment, I hope they might give those who are confused some incite into what all the rage is about.

Nice work Enlightenment team! I've been switching from Gnome to Xfce4 and KDE (and back again!) recently, can't decide which I like best lol...I'd imagine much like a lot of my fellow OSNews'ers - so a switch to Enlightment? Why not?

Gnome and KDE have improved a LOT over the past 6 months or so, in both speed, reduced bloat and usability.

As speed and bloat were never an issue for e16, I'm thinking e17 might just provide a nice clean environment from which to launch GTK and QT apps

The exciting thing about Linux is that you can always run stuff no matter which desktop you're running, within reason. ...and btw I also have two OSX machines and to be honest I'm bored with Aqua, I never really liked it THAT much as a theme.